Arkon Energy, a data center infrastructure business, announced a $110 million private fundraising round to extend its operations entirely to Eltrys.
Bluesky Capital Management led the round, which also included Kestrel 0x1 and Nural Capital.
The firm commenced operations in 2021 with a 5-megawatt plant in Australia. It has now grown to more than 130 megawatts and has extended into other nations and areas, such as the United States and Europe.
“These sites appeal to both bitcoin miners and AI [or] machine learning clients who have very high power computing demands,” Payne said in a statement. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 1 megawatt can power between 400 and 900 households each year.
As part of its ambition to boost the business’s total megawatts by 130% by mid-2024, the company will spend around $80 million to buy an additional 200-megawatt capacity across new data centers in Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas. Payne highlighted that this is in addition to Arkon’s current 100-megawatt plant in Ohio, which it bought in June.
“The U.S. is an attractive market for us in many ways, largely because of the enormous domestic customer demand, a mature and robust energy industry with several flexible and deregulated markets, political and regulatory stability, and attractiveness to institutional investors,” Payne said in a statement. “The U.S. has an abundance of stranded, underutilized power generation assets that are connected to some of the lowest-cost electricity sources in the world, many of which are renewable.”
According to Payne, institutional-grade bitcoin mining businesses occupy the majority of the company’s data center portfolio in the United States. “We are essentially a landlord who owns the underlying infrastructure assets.”
Arkon’s business strategy is based on purchasing distressed data center properties strategically across the world. “The current and future demand for all types of data center capacity that we are seeing globally, but especially in the United States, is unprecedented and monumental. “The customers we serve have energy-intensive platforms that need a massive quantity of properly managed and controlled electrical infrastructure.”
The remaining $30 million will go toward the development of an artificial intelligence cloud service project at Arkon’s data center in Norway, which will aid in the servicing of generative AI and huge language model training markets. “Over the last year, there has been a profound market acceleration in demand for generative AI and large learning model applications,” he told me.
However, there is a scarcity of specialized physical infrastructure to power the computers and servers that power the majority of these devices. Arkon intends to address that need by supplying the underlying infrastructure layer on which the AI industry is built.
There has been a “meteoric rise in AI applications” in the last year, as well as possible expansion and acceptance for bitcoin in mainstream institutional markets as a spot ETF certification approaches, making specialist data centers like Arkon’s “poised to continue scaling exponentially,” according to Payne.